One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

America's "Oh heck, lets commit genocide" in Laos: “One of the most shattering revelations about the bombing was discovering why it had so vastly increased in 1969, as described by the refugees. [Antiwar activist Fred Branfman] learned that after President Lyndon Johnson had declared a bombing halt over North Vietnam in November 1968, he had simply diverted the planes into northern Laos. There was no military reason for doing so. It was simply because, as U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission Monteagle Stearns testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in October 1969, `Well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t just let them stay there with nothing to do’.”

Noam Chomsky Holds the New York Times to Account

Paul Craig Roberts

I can remember when the New York Times was only partly a CIA asset
using its ink in support of Washington’s lies. The other part of the
paper was the upper class paternalistic liberalism of that time. The
New York Times helped to destroy America.

Washington has taken the place of America and now the Times serves
full time to protect Washington. All the troubles in the world originate
independently of Washington, which is always trying to do good for
everybody and to maintain stability for the One Percent.

Stability trickles down. If the One Percent couldn’t afford their
$750,000 Franck Muller wrist watches and their $700,000 Mont Blanc
jewel-encrusted pens, their $50,000,000 yachts, and $42,000 Louis Vitton
handbags carried by $100,000 bodyguards, the rest of us would be down
and out. I mean, really, what would be our fate if hedge fund managers
didn’t collect their $575,000,000 bonuses each year and the Federal
Reserve didn’t print trillions of dollars with which to buy the bad
assets of the deregulated banks too-big-to-fail”? There would be
nothing to trickle down to those minimum wage part-time Walmart jobs. If
the rich weren’t ripping us off, we would be even worse off!

That’s the way the New York Times and its chief fool, Thomas Friedman, reason.

Here is Noam Chomsky explaining how the Times covers up Washington’s crimes with platitudes:

The “Paper of Record” Is Pure Propaganda
Noam Chomsky

A front-page article is devoted to a flawed story about a campus rape
in the journal Rolling Stone, exposed in the leading academic journal
of media critique. So severe is this departure from journalistic
integrity that it is also the subject of the lead story in the business
section, with a full inside page devoted to the continuation of the two
reports. The shocked reports refer to several past crimes of the press: a
few cases of fabrication, quickly exposed, and cases of plagiarism
(“too numerous to list”). The specific crime of Rolling Stone is “lack
of skepticism,” which is “in many ways the most insidious” of the three
categories.

It is refreshing to see the commitment of the Times to the integrity of journalism.

On page 7 of the same issue, there is an important story by Thomas
Fuller headlined “One Woman’s Mission to free Laos from Unexploded
Bombs.” It reports the “single-minded effort” of a Lao-American woman,
Channapha Khamvongsa, “to rid her native land of millions of bombs still
buried there, the legacy of a nine-year American air campaign that made
Laos one of the most heavily bombed places on earth” – soon to be
outstripped by rural Cambodia, following the orders of Henry Kissinger
to the US air force: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything
that flies on anything that moves.” A comparable call for virtual
genocide would be very hard to find in the archival record. It was
mentioned in the Times in an article on released tapes of President
Nixon, and elicited little notice.

The Fuller story on Laos reports that as a result of Ms. Khamvongsa’s
lobbying, the US increased its annual spending on removal of unexploded
bombs by a munificent $12 million. The most lethal are cluster bombs,
which are designed to “cause maximum casualties to troops” by spraying
“hundreds of bomblets onto the ground.” About 30 percent remain
unexploded, so that they kill and maim children who pick up the pieces,
farmers who strike them while working, and other unfortunates. An
accompanying map features Xieng Khouang province in northern Laos,
better known as the Plain of Jars, the primary target of the intensive
bombing, which reached its peak of fury in 1969.

Fuller reports that Ms. Khamvongsa “was spurred into action when she
came across a collection of drawings of the bombings made by refugees
and collected by Fred Branfman, an antiwar activist who helped expose
the Secret War.” The drawings appear in the late Fred Branfman’s
remarkable book Voices from the Plain of Jars, published in 1972,
republished by the U. of Wisconsin press in 2013 with a new
introduction. The drawings vividly display the torment of the victims,
poor peasants in a remote area that had virtually nothing to do with the
Vietnam war, as officially conceded. One typical report by a 26
year-old nurse captures the nature of the air war: “There wasn’t a night
when we thought we’d live until morning, never a morning we thought
we’d survive until night. Did our children cry? Oh, yes, and we did
also. I just stayed in my cave. I didn’t see the sunlight for two years.
What did I think about? Oh, I used to repeat, `please don’t let the
planes come, please don’t let the planes come, please don’t let the
planes come.'”

Branfman’s valiant efforts did indeed bring some awareness of this
hideous atrocity. His assiduous researches also unearthed the reasons
for the savage destruction of a helpless peasant society. He exposes the
reasons once again in the introduction to the new edition of Voices. In
his words:

“One of the most shattering revelations about the bombing was
discovering why it had so vastly increased in 1969, as described by the
refugees. I learned that after President Lyndon Johnson had declared a
bombing halt over North Vietnam in November 1968, he had simply diverted
the planes into northern Laos. There was no military reason for doing
so. It was simply because, as U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission Monteagle
Stearns testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in
October 1969, `Well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t
just let them stay there with nothing to do’.”

Therefore the unused planes were unleashed on poor peasants,
devastating the peaceful Plain of Jars, far from the ravages of
Washington’s murderous wars of aggression in Indochina.

Let us now see how these revelations are transmuted into New York
Times Newspeak: “The targets were North Vietnamese troops — especially
along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a large part of which passed through Laos —
as well as North Vietnam’s Laotian Communist allies.”

Compare the words of the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission, and the
heart-rending drawings and testimony in Fred Branfman’s cited
collection.

True, the reporter has a source: U.S. propaganda. That surely
suffices to overwhelm mere fact about one of the major crimes of the
post-World War II era, as detailed in the very source he cites: Fred
Branfman’s crucial revelations.

We can be confident that this colossal lie in the service of the
state will not merit lengthy exposure and denunciation of disgraceful
misdeeds of the Free Press, such as plagiarism and lack of skepticism.
The same issue of the New York Times treats us to a report by the
inimitable Thomas Friedman, earnestly relaying the words of President
Obama presenting what Friedman labels “the Obama Doctrine” – every
President has to have a Doctrine. The profound Doctrine is
“’engagement,’ combined with meeting core strategic needs.

The President illustrated with a crucial case: “You take a country
like Cuba. For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a
better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren’t that many risks for
us. It’s a tiny little country. It’s not one that threatens our core
security interests, and so [there’s no reason not] to test the
proposition. And if it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better
outcomes, we can adjust our policies.”

Here the Nobel Peace laureate expands on his reasons for undertaking
what the leading US left-liberal intellectual journal, the New York
Review, hails as the “brave” and “truly historic step” of reestablishing
diplomatic relations with Cuba. It is a move undertaken in order to
“more effectively empower the Cuban people,” the hero explained, our
earlier efforts to bring them freedom and democracy having failed to
achieve our noble goals. The earlier efforts included a crushing embargo
condemned by the entire world (Israel excepted) and a brutal terrorist
war. The latter is as usual wiped out of history, apart from failed
attempts to assassinate Castro, a very minor feature, acceptable because
it can be dismissed with scorn as ridiculous CIA shenanigans. Turning
to the declassified internal record, we learn that these crimes were
undertaken because of Cuba’s “successful defiance” of US policy going
back to the Monroe Doctrine, which declared Washington’s intent to rule
the hemisphere. All unmentionable, along with too much else to recount
here.

Searching further we find other gems, for example, the front-page
think piece on the Iran deal by Peter Baker a few days earlier, warning
about the Iranian crimes regularly listed by Washington’s propaganda
system. All prove to be quite revealing on analysis, though none more so
than the ultimate Iranian crime: “destabilizing” the region by
supporting “Shiite militias that killed American soldiers in Iraq.” Here
again is the standard picture. When the US invades Iraq, virtually
destroying it and inciting sectarian conflicts that are tearing the
country and now the whole region apart, that counts as “stabilization”
in official and hence media rhetoric. When Iran supports militias
resisting the aggression, that is “destabilization.” And there could
hardly be a more heinous crime than killing American soldiers attacking
one’s homes.

All of this, and far, far more, makes perfect sense if we show due
obedience and uncritically accept approved doctrine: The US owns the
world, and it does so by right, for reasons also explained lucidly in
the New York Review, in a March 2015 article by Jessica Matthews, former
president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “American
contributions to international security, global economic growth,
freedom, and human well-being have been so self-evidently unique and
have been so clearly directed to others’ benefit that Americans have
long believed that the US amounts to a different kind of country. Where
others push their national interests, the US tries to advance universal
principles.” Defense rests.

1 comment:

I've just glimpsed a snippet on your site about the U.S. War vs Laos. I was somewhat of an "expert" on that! I researched everything available on the "Plain Of Jars"; where the U.S. broke all previous records for the "speed of genocide" with its complete eradication of an entire people (thru carpet-bombing). Back then, I changed my "standard" Anti-Vietnam-War Speech (I DID speak dozens and dozens of times) to include a special section on the Plain Of Jars.

About Me

B.S. in Physics, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1960 Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1966. Fellow, American Physical
Society. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fellow, American Ceramic Society. Member, Geological Society of America, Research Physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC,
1967-2001. Fulbright-García Robles Fellow at Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1997. Invited Professor of Research at Universités
de Paris-6 & 7, Lyon-1, et St-Etienne (France) and Tokyo Institute
of Technology, 2000-2004. Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering, University of Arizona, 2004-2005. Consultancy: impactGlass
research international, 2005-present.
Winner, one national and two international research awards and honored
by Brown University with a "Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus
Award." Author, 198 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books, Principal Author of 114 of these.